A Word Child

by Iris Murdoch

  I was fumbling frenziedly with the letters. I opened Kitty’s first. It said, Do as he asks, please. He must never know I saw you. Thank you and good-bye. K.J. Then I opened Gunnar’s. Gunnar’s note was a little longer. I would like to see you and talk to you, once only, and I hope you will agree to meet me. I suggest this evening, Sunday, about six o’clock at the above address. G.J.

  So Gunnar too used Biscuit post. I put the letters away in my pocket and unglued myself from the door. Thank you and good-bye. The end of the quest was in sight, the Lady had already gone. I took a fivepenny ticket and went on down towards the eastbound platform. Sightless, breathless, I waited for an Inner Circle train. Bayswater, Paddington, Edgware Road, Baker Street, Great Portland Street, Euston Square, King’s Cross …

  Once again I was an hour early at Cheyne Walk. I had not returned to the flat. I spent most of the day on the Inner Circle. At lunch-time I stopped at Sloane Square and endeavoured to eat a sandwich. I drank a cautious amount of whisky, then mounted the train again. About four thirty I was back at Sloane Square. The rain had stopped, but a cold east wind was blowing. I was still, of course, coatless. I walked briskly along the King’s Road and then down towards the river, passing Gunnar’s house at about five o’clock. A light showed above the curtains on the first floor. I wondered if Kitty and Gunnar were there talking about me. I wandered a bit in the gardens and inspected a statue by Epstein representing a woman tearing her clothes off. I went into Chelsea Old Church and wandered about in the half dark reading the memorial tablets and wondering if when I was alone with Gunnar I would faint. At six o’clock exactly I rang the door bell.

  Gunnar opened the door. A sort of gust of emotion came out of the house together with the warmth of the central heating.

  ‘Good evening. Nice of you to come.’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘Will you come upstairs?’

  These astounding words were uttered.

  I followed him up the stairs. The place smelt of solid well-to-do warmth and expensive furnishing and Kitty’s perfume. I followed Gunnar up into the drawing-room.

  The beautiful room was as menacing to me as if I had passed under a portcullis. Or perhaps it was more like the sultan’s palace where you cross the marble courtyard and pass by the fountain and walk in under the mosaic colonnade to the room full of soft hangings where you are to be strangled. I had an instantaneous vision as I came in of Gunnar and me locked in frightful combat staggering about breaking vases and plates and lamps. A room to bleed in, a room to die in.

  It was indeed a beautiful room. I had seen a number of wall-appointed drawing-rooms by this time, Laura Impiatt’s for instance, and Clifford’s, but this room was the most casually gorgeous I had ever entered. By comparison, Laura’s taste was pretentious, Clifford’s was cold. This was a big room with big confident furniture in it, lit by many lamps upon many tables. A large Chinese lacquer cabinet dominated one end, a carved marble mantelpiece with an immense gilt mirror over it the other. The carpet, which appeared to be Aubusson, strewed the centre of the room with roses inside an elliptical yellow medallion, and stretched away into shadow beneath tables, desks, bookcases. It was a grand man’s grand room: a far cry from the muddled prettiness of a room which had existed once in north Oxford.

  There was a marked silence. The windows must have been double-glazed. The embankment traffic was the faintest murmur, merely perhaps a vibration. Gunnar walked and I still followed to where a small fire was burning beneath the festooned marble of the mantelpiece. On a low table was a tray with bottles and glasses and cigarettes in a malachite box.

  ‘Would you like a drink?’

  ‘Thank you, yes. Whisky and soda.’

  ‘Do you smoke?’

  ‘No, thank you.’

  ‘Didn’t you have a coat?’

  ‘A coat? No.’

  After this piece of conversation Gunnar busied himself with the drinks. He filled a cut glass tumbler with whisky and soda, then went on holding it for a moment, looking into the fire and breathing hard, before handing it to me. He poured out some whisky for himself. He took a cigarette, then threw it back. He did not ask me to sit down. Then he began to look at me. We looked at each other.

  It was an odd looking, like a sort of staring through time. As sometimes the cinema plays with a man’s features, wrapping them in mist, then changing them from age to youth, so we looked. Gunnar, in the subdued golden glitter-laden light of his own drawing-room, looked younger than I had seen him look since his return into my life. In fact he seemed to have been getting steadily younger since that first moment when I had passed him upon the stairs. He had an outdoor look, only now more that of a sea captain than of a rugger blue. His face was weathered, larger but without flabbiness, more commanding, his bigness formidable still. He was wearing a soft dark tweed suit and a radiantly white shirt with a surprisingly gaudy tie. I was wearing my shabby greasy everyday office suit which had not been improved by a lot of lying about on beds and travelling in the underground and being rained upon. We stared at each other, standing there with a tense quietness which could have been the prelude to the reeling wrestling death struggle which I had been picturing just now.

  Gunnar’s look, however, was curiously objective. It was not angry, it rather expressed puzzlement, curiosity, perhaps a fastidious distaste. It was obviously going to be extremely difficult to begin the conversation. I was rigid with emotion, only my lower jaw had a slight tendency to tremble. I kept turning my drink round and round, feeling the criss-cross pattern on the glass. I had no conception of anything to say and had deliberately throughout the day avoided the invention of any possible speech. I wanted to be ready for anything, for incoherent fury, for emotional breakdown. I had not expected quite this awful coolness.

  ‘Thank you for coming,’ said Gunnar.

  ‘Not at all.’

  We had said that before.

  Gunnar began to walk to and fro, a step or two to the window curtains, a step or two back to the hearth rug, rather as Kitty had paced upon the wooden jetty. Where was Kitty now? Was she at the door listening? This quietness could not last. What outburst would end it?

  ‘I wanted to see you just once and talk about the past,’ said Gunnar. ‘Just once, because I think that will be enough. More would be an imposition. And I don’t imagine you particularly want to see me.’

  ‘I imagine you don’t particularly want to see me, in general that is — I felt suddenly that I was going to be stupid, and the idea of appearing stupid to Gunnar filled me with a black ferocious misery. He would say to Kitty, and perhaps this would be the great moment of relief: after all, he is a little stupid man.

  ‘No, of course. And obviously here there can’t be any sort of ordinary — conversation — or,’ he sought for the word, ‘armistice’.

  ‘Or — reconciliation — No, of course not.’

  But why not? Was not this the only thing worth striving for, the only thing that really mattered? I felt the anguish, the tongue-tied stupidity, the sense of being gripped by a relentless and mocking past.

  ‘I daresay you detest me,’ said Gunnar. ‘I messed up your life and one naturally hates people one has injured.’

  ‘Naturally.’ It was as if Gunnar were putting the words into my mouth. And yet the old hatred and anger spoke for me with an authority which no gentleness could shake. ‘I messed up your life.’ Stupidity.

  ‘Quite. But look — this is a — almost a technical question. You know, it has done me a lot of good just to see you.’

  This could have been a humane remark, but in the context it sounded almost clinical.

  ‘You can perhaps have no idea,’ Gunnar went on, ‘how obsessed I have been with the past. Some people can get over tragedies in their lives. I have never managed to get over this one.’

  ‘Neither have I,’ I said. ‘I have never stopped feeling guilty and — ’ My words lacked conviction. What place could there be in this conversation run by Gunnar for any sort of ask
ing of pardon?

  ‘I don’t think I want to know about your feelings,’ said Gunnar. He said it judiciously, not vindictively. ‘I have been entirely selfish in demanding this conversation. And it is not without its risks.’

  ‘You mean we might fight?’

  ‘No, no, of course not. I mean, where old awful things in one’s mind are concerned, a mistake or an accident could have serious consequences.’

  ‘A mistake or an accident?’

  ‘Yes. All our words are so loaded. You could say something which I could never forget.’

  ‘I must be careful what I say then, mustn’t I,’ I said. He was cool, I was becoming cold. I thought, he has grown old after all, he has become a pompous ass. He has taken this risk, but he will not allow anything violent or truthful to emerge. And I cannot tell the truth, I have almost trained myself not to. And we are not in the presence of anything which can compel truth from us. What would it be like anyway, that explosion? The room would clatter and break after all.

  ‘Quite,’ said Gunnar. He was silent for a moment. We had both put our glasses down on the table without drinking.

  ‘But can you not formulate what you want? Do you want actually to discuss the past?’

  Gunnar was silent again for a bit. Then he said, ‘No. I don’t think so. I used to think I wanted to. Do people who have been in concentration camps together reminisce? I doubt it. I have spent years in deep analysis. I have talked about it all so much — ’

  The idea of Gunnar describing all that to some enigmatic man in Hampstead or New York made me feel sick. I said impatiently, ‘What do you want then?’

  ‘I thought I wanted to talk about Anne,’ said Gunnar.

  The name quivered in the room, seeming to make it tremble and ring.

  ‘But you don’t want to?’ Did I? I desperately wanted something, which I could now as if for the first time glimpse and which could only be got here, and which I was not going to be allowed to receive.

  ‘Possibly it is enough simply to utter her name in your presence.’

  ‘You have done so,’ I said. ‘What else do you want to do in my presence?’

  ‘It is as if,’ said Gunnar, ignoring my remark, gazing at the fire, ‘I wanted at last to get rid of Anne. That may seem a terrible way to put it. But — you see — it isn’t the real Anne of course. The real Anne is dead.’

  There was a silence in which I could hear my own heavy breathing, as if I were gasping for air, and his too.

  ‘She is dead,’ said Gunnar, picking it up as if it were a line in poetry, sighing, ‘and gone from us and we must respect her — absolute — absence. She is out of this. What remains is a sort of a — foul ghost. I have felt this especially — because it has been so — awfully unfair to — to people one lives with now.’

  I was silent, spellbound. I wanted now to hear where his eloquence would lead him.

  ‘Her ghost,’ he said slowly, ‘not her at all, but something else, made up out of the vile stuff, the rags and tatters of my mind, and sopping up somehow, blackened and stained by, all that awful hatred and passion for revenge — ’

  ‘Hatred of me?’

  ‘Yes. I somehow — made her carry it. Do you understand?’

  I was not sure. But I felt the hatred and it paralysed me.

  He went on, ‘If she had been killed in an aeroplane crash or had died of cancer, I would have been shattered with grief but I would have recovered. But since she died — as she did die — I have never been able to divide — in my soul — that grief from a sort of living burning hatred and a — wickedness which is so deep — it is the deepest thing of all — ’

  Is there nothing deeper than wickedness then, I wondered. But I did not say this because it was dawning on me, and with a terrible final sense of despair, that really Gunnar did not want me to talk at all. As he had said at the start, he did not want to know about my feelings. I had said to myself, I had said, oh God, to Kitty, that I was to be merely an instrument. This was surely the perfection of penance, of restitution, to work mechanically for the wronged one, to work in silence as on a treadmill, asking nothing for oneself. But I had never, even when I spoke of it, pictured an operation which, for me, was to be so totally profitless.

  ‘How will talking to me help this?’ I said coldly, stupidly, playing my role.

  ‘It is no good talking to an analyst,’ said Gunnar as if he had not heard me. ‘In fact I have never said this to an analyst. I have only just really been able to formulate it since you came into the room. I have got to get rid of her, not of her, but of this filthy ghost thing — and let her alone and let her be alone as the dead should be — at last — and doing that means — getting rid of you.’

  It sounded, in that faintly sighed-through silence, like the announcement of intention to commit murder, and it occurred to me with a strange poignancy that if Gunnar were now to try to kill me I should not resist. There would be no raging and wrestling to and fro, only the blood upon the Aubusson carpet. I said coldly, almost nastily, ‘Well, I’m quite ready to be got rid of. At your service. How do we set about it?’

  ‘We are doing it,’ said Gunnar. ‘You see, I imagined you as — as if you were a sort of — dreadful being — a sort of vile cruel malevolent — killer.’ His voice trembled.

  ‘I suppose I was.’

  ‘No. That’s the point. You were just a — just a — ’

  ‘Poor fish, victim of chance, muddler, little lecherous adulterer — ’

  ‘Well — ’

  ‘And now you can see it.’

  ‘And now I can see it. And that brings with it — a sort of pity for her — which enables me — which may enable me — to leave her alone. You see — what was so awful was that I blamed her too.’

  This was a simple enough idea but as he said it I realized that though I had perhaps conceived it I had never fell it. Poor Anne, oh poor Anne. If only I could utter those words. But the cure was not for me, nothing here was for me. I had simply to be quiet and to run the hazard of the ‘mistakes and accidents’, those things which might be said and never forgotten. I was there to be exhibited, to be despised, to be seen at last, not as a murderous villain, but as a small mean semi-conscious malignancy, a cog in the majestic wheel of chance.

  ‘It was a muddle,’ I said. ‘There was — an accident.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Gunnar softly, still not looking at me, ‘if I could only see — and feel — that.’

  ‘Do you want me to — ?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  There was a short silence, he staring at the fire, moving his head gently to and fro, his blue eyes vague, as if some gentleness were coming to be in them. But not for me. I felt exasperation, misery, fear, the trembling in the lower jaw, coldness.

  Gunnar picked up his glass and gulped a little. He said, ‘It is remarkable.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘The effect of saying certain things, of simply thinking certain things, thinking them perhaps for the first time, in your presence. It’s a remarkable — catalyst.’

  ‘Hadn’t you better hire me on a permanent basis to sit in the corner of the room like a dog? Your guests wouldn’t mind, would they?’

  ‘It’s better than — my God — all those years of analysis, all those conceited analysts, how I hated them, all those tens of thousands of dollars — One of them said this actually.’

  ‘That you should see me?’

  ‘Yes. “Why don’t you just go and have a look at the guy?” he said.’

  ‘You’ve looked. Has it done the trick? A little early to tell.’

  ‘It is early to tell,’ said Gunnar, and his eyes were very dreamy now. ‘But I think — that — whatever can be done is done — and I won’t be waiting for it any more. And after all when it comes it’s something very simple, a dialectical change, the end of a nightmare, the breaking of something which can now naturally fragment away.’

  ‘I don’t quite understand,’ I said, ‘but I hope you’re right. How
do we continue the treatment?’

  ‘Oh, there will be no need for me to trouble you again,’ said Gunnar.

  ‘I know you said “once” but I — It now seems to melt’s certainly no trouble to me — I’d be very glad to turn up — ’

  ‘No, no,’ said Gunnar. ‘It’s much better left as it is. Another meeting would weaken it — ’

  ‘And of course there are the risks!’

  ‘Yes. I am sorry to be so enigmatic and self-centred but I have been forced to live very much inside my own mind.’ He hesitated. ‘Of course I am being perfectly selfish — ’

  Was this a cue? I could not think, I could not feel, and the moment passed.